The Coelacanth: A Living Fossil
The coelacanth is the one case a working zoologist gets to point at and say: this is what rediscovery looks like when it goes right. A lineage written off as extinct since the Late Cretaceous turned up alive in a fishing net in 1938, was handed a museum specimen, a Linnaean name, and a peer-reviewed […]
The Thylacine Survival Question: From 1936 Extinction to Modern Sightings
What Happened to the Thylacine, and Why Are People Still Looking? The last captive Thylacine, a male named Benjamin, died at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo on September 7, 1936, ending the documented existence of Thylacinus cynocephalus as a verified living species. Tasmania’s parliament had granted the marsupial legal protection only fifty-nine days earlier, on July 10, […]